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Will Value Investors Win the Day? Wait Five Years and See.

In today's market, people may lose a lot of money before they make more. Yet even times like these could prove profitable in the long run for value investors.

By

Brett Arends

Updated March 4, 2009 12:49 a.m. ET

Investors have been through this sort of meltdown twice before in the modern era: Wall Street during the 1930s, and Japan in the 1990s. What do they tell us to expect? James Montier, the great contrarian strategist at SG Securities, has run the numbers and they are fascinating.

In a nutshell: If we end up like Japan, value investors are going to make money. If we end up like the Great Depression, absolutely no stock market strategy is going to work for the next couple of years.